As you may or may not know, today is the day before the most contentious election in recent memory. Aside from the
presidential race between a competent woman and a can of orange spray paint, there are also a host of down-ballot
candidates at the federal, state, and local levels, and, here in San Francisco, an outstanding 42 state, regional,
and city ballot propositions. Asisusual, I've received a
healthy pile of 77 pieces of election spam this season; here's my tally.

Overall, of the 77 pieces of mail that my wife and I received in the months leading up to this election, 15 of
them were voting slates and 62 of them were either single-issue or, in many cases, dual-issue (U & P,
Q & R). As far as I can tell, only a single one of them (the state-issued party-level official endorsements)
even touched on the presidential campaign. Read on for details!

Hello readers! If you've been living under a rock (or, really, anywhere that isn't California), this coming
Tuesday (June 7th) is the most important primary election in California in recent memory! As befits such a momentous
occasion, I've received another batch of election spam!1

Surprisingly, the biggest issue in this election in San Francisco isn't the presidential primary, but is instead the
election of the Democratic County Central Committee (the DCCC); the vast
majority of election spam that I received was either a complete slate for the DCCC, or an ad for an individual
candidate ...

Most of the work done in actual programming jobs is taking structured data in some particular format from one system, slightly tweaking it, and sending it off to some other system. When exchanging data between different processes, it's almost always necessary to serialize it into a series of bytes which can be sent across a dumb byte-oriented transport (such as TCP). There are hundreds upon hundreds of different serialization formats out there, but I just wanted to talk about a few of the most common that folks use with the Python programming language.

In addition to all of this paper spam, I now get between one and four phone calls a day from supporters of various candidates (and, in one case, from a candidate themselves). And three times now, I've caught campaigners tailgating into my apartment building to annoy people door-to-door.

You may or may not know this, but 2015 is shaping up to be a big election year in San Francisco. Yes, it's an off-year. Yes, there are "only" nine propositions on the ballot. Nonetheless, if you believe the rhetoric, this is the year that's going to make it or break it for the city of San Francisco. How do I know all this? It's because I read through all 46 pieces of printed advertising that I've received so far this season.

In February, I Kickstarted the Pebble Time. As soon as it was announced (March 3), I upgraded my Kickstarter pledge to the Pebble Time Steel. As you might remember from last year, I had Kickstarted the original Pebble ("Pebble Classic" now) and purchased the Pebble Steel as soon as it was released, so this was a no-brainer.

Well, it took a few months longer than expected, but my Time Steel arrived about a week ago, and here's my review.